Subject: Gemini and other AI musings
Putting this here only because it's Gemini related.

Some random AI musings. Recently the app version of Gemini has become my go to for all things prompt related. Grok was quite good but became un-usable without a paid subscription while gemini remains free and I have yet to hit any usage limits. If you are willing to share more of your data, turning on "Memory" under "Personal Intelligence" within Settings does allow Gemini to retain more details about your chats, emails, etc... allowing for better contextual answers. To each their own and no judgement.

My employer remains bound to CoPilot due to full M365 entrenchment throughout the organization. With top tier license it is quite good for gathering relevant data across the massive enterprise and serving up insightful and hard to recall information that tends to become lost. I was looking for background on a topic that re-surfaced. I knew we had addressed it previously in my working life and CoPilot was able to find a four year old email thread as well as a Sharepoint document outlining a pilot program that was ran but never followed up on by a co-worker. Where it falls short is actually DOING anything. It can help with finding open times for meetings and such but still not allowed to create and send the invite on my behalf. As quick as things are changing it could be corporate IT/security holding it back at this point but I don't know.

In my personal non-work related life I decided to spin up my own OpenClaw and see what all the hype was about (sandboxed in its own apple account for security). I grew up during the DOS/C++ days so the terminal line really isn't all that intimidating to me but I haven't done any "programming" outside of Excel in 20 years. I have to honestly say it blew me away. In relatively little time a normal human can have a working AI agent on a Mac system (if you are an apple household like us) that you can communicate to via imessage and have it take action on your behalf if you choose. Tell it to remember a recipe and it files it away in a format of your choosing (markdown, numbers, etc) with links to a web recipe or image sent to it that can then be recalled with any prompt in the future. It will text extract even the most unreadable cursive handwriting from my great grandmother's recipe cards. Send it an image of a game schedule for one of our children and it will put all the events on the apple calendar associated with that child. Admittedly this is something Gemini will do natively if you are a google household and I hope for Apple's sake they are bringing the same capability to "Siri AI".

A quick single data point on google. I initially had my agent using Google cloud based models via API. It worked well until sometime around May when even on paid tiers the model access was routinely down due to too much traffic. In my opinion Google seems to be steering all their compute to their own Gemini tools which is understandable but does concern me a bit when it comes to the Apple partnership. For those nerdy enough to care, I switched to OpenRouter and the agent performance using any of the latest top tier models is drastically improved over the likes of the Gemini Flash or even pro models via API as well as avoiding timeout errors.

Why do this? Because I want to try and determine where this is all going and how I (and my soon to be working age children) can remain relevant and employable. I have told many co-workers, I believe within the next 6-18 months many of our jobs will be gone and/or how we do them will be vastly different. Most of the time I get blank stares or push back as their only lens is CoPilot acting as a "smarter search" or "writing tool". My opinion is you either need to figure out how to use these tools or face the fact that you will be left behind. Once you understand how easily these tools can be created as well as their capabilities, you start to look at many things you encounter in your daily life and say "why the heck isn't AI doing that?". After a few instances it becomes very eye opening.

Jeff